Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the field of e-commerce. More particularly, this invention relates to the correlation of web browsing with purchase behavior so that the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of web content can be more easily evaluated.
Description of the Related Art
Advances in and proliferation of the Internet has resulted in an explosion of the World Wide Web as a virtual marketplace. Electronic commerce (“e-commerce”) is pervasive and has resulted in the categorization of retail markets into web-based e-commerce or traditional physical store locations, frequently referred to as “bricks and mortar” retailers.
E-commerce poses significant challenges for its participants. Traditional methods of analyzing customer behavior in a store (observation of an interaction with the customer) and determining what factors played a part in convincing a purchaser to make a purchase cannot be accomplished. Unless an e-commerce retailer is able to look over the shoulder of a perspective purchaser as they browse the web and research products prior to purchase, the retailer has very little information, other than the purchase itself, to use for analyzing the customer's behavior.
For a pure e-commerce company (a company that has no physical store location), significant effort has been directed to development of methods for tracking customer behavior prior to their making a “net-purchase”, i.e., a purchase made completely on the web with delivery being facilitated electronically where possible or by mail if needed. Products such as IBM's WebSphere Site Analyzer allow the tracking of a user of a website so that the various actions taken by the user, e.g., clicking on a particular link, placing items into the electronic shopping cart, deletions from the electronic shopping cart, etc., can be stored and analyzed.
These web analytics applications use to their advantage the fact that most web applications treat a visit to a website, regardless of where the user navigates within that site, as a single “session”. By establishing a “session ID” at the start of a session, and then logging the activity of the user during that session, the user's path through and activity on the website can be precisely tracked and studied. U.S. Pat. No. 6,223,215 to Hunt et al., incorporated fully herein by reference, gives a thorough explanation of tracking a user's activity prior to a net purchase based on a session ID.
The advent of e-commerce has also enabled traditional “brick and mortar” retailers to make their in-store inventory (referred to herein as “offline inventory”) available on-line (referred to herein as “on-line inventory”). These “click and mortar” companies, such as Walmart, offer a full selection of on-line inventory that is almost equivalent to its off-line inventory; however, a very small percentage of on-line visitors actually make purchases on-line. For many reasons (security, privacy, value, experience), a high percentage of on-line visitors to a click and mortar website (e.g., walmart.com) are “cross-channel customers,” that is, they use the website to research products and then make their purchases in the store. Worse yet for the click and mortar companies, many of these cross-channel customers make their purchase from competitors after using the website of the click and mortar company.
Click-and-mortar companies have developed many Web applications to woo their prospective on-line customers into their off-line stores. These applications provide features such as store locators that give detailed directions to store locations; on-line coupons that offer price savings and other incentives to purchase from the off-line store; and the ability to make an on-line purchase with off-line pickup at the store. However, while these applications may result in an increased likelihood that a user doing on-line web research on the website of a click and mortar company will ultimately make an off-line purchase at their store based on that research, there are no prior art systems that enable a correlation to be made between the details of the web research and the actual purchase in such a manner that the user's web activity during the research phase of their shopping experience can be identified and analyzed.
This “research on the web, purchase at the store” phenomenon presents a dilemma for click and mortar companies. To maximize the use of a particular website as a vehicle to facilitate purchases, the click and mortar company would like to be able to track the activity of the user on the website during a web session that results in a sale; however, present methods, e.g., on-line coupons, only tell the click and mortar company that someone was directed to the store from the website. They provide no information regarding the web activity during the session that led to the purchase, and this information may be extremely valuable for measuring and enhancing the effectiveness of the website.
Accordingly, there is a need for a mechanism by which a particular purchase made at an off-line store that resulted from an on-line research session can be tied to that session in such a way that the use of the website during that session can be tracked.